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> Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different?

> Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different? Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means. Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields. Maybe that's Elon, I don't know.

imgabe 4y ago
> exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10. > significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields. Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process. I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
- insanitybit 4y ago
  > I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does. I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for. Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    I mean, if you were actually curious you could have spent 5 minutes reading Wikipedia or any number of other sources for what people attribute to him. It's not like the information is hard to find. Like, the guy builds one company that literally becomes the most valuable in the world, and another company that builds rockets that a lot of people said were literally impossible and you just write that off as "oh he didn't do anything special, he just had a rich dad". I mean come on, it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith.
    - insanitybit 4y ago
      I didn't expect a "why he's considered a genius" on the wikipedia page but I can check that out. I expected a pretty simple answer. I asked this about Kanye the other day and got a great response explaining how his music was novel. Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
      - imgabe 4y ago
        Why would business accomplishments not make someone a genius? Business requires creativity and intelligence just as much as any other field of human endeavor. Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy. Pre-Tesla, the public perception of elecric cars was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA (this did not age well) They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models. I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.

imgabe 4y ago

> exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10. > significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields. Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process. I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.

insanitybit 4y ago
> I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does. I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for. Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
- imgabe 4y ago
  I mean, if you were actually curious you could have spent 5 minutes reading Wikipedia or any number of other sources for what people attribute to him. It's not like the information is hard to find. Like, the guy builds one company that literally becomes the most valuable in the world, and another company that builds rockets that a lot of people said were literally impossible and you just write that off as "oh he didn't do anything special, he just had a rich dad". I mean come on, it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith.
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    I didn't expect a "why he's considered a genius" on the wikipedia page but I can check that out. I expected a pretty simple answer. I asked this about Kanye the other day and got a great response explaining how his music was novel. Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
    - imgabe 4y ago
      Why would business accomplishments not make someone a genius? Business requires creativity and intelligence just as much as any other field of human endeavor. Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy. Pre-Tesla, the public perception of elecric cars was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA (this did not age well) They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models. I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.